Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [9]
Gandhi’s statue, Tavistock Square
In short, it seemed the ideal spot for writers, then and now. In Tavistock Square today, for instance, the focal point is a statue of Gandhi, a clutch of votive candles at the base of the memorial, a branch of flowers habitually wilting in his cross-legged lap. To one side of him is a tree “planted in memory of the victims of Hiroshima by the worshipful mayor of Camden councillour Mrs. Millie Miller JP 6 August 1967,” and not far from it is an enormous slab of rock littered with browning white carnations with the inscription “To all those who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill,” which turns out to be a memorial to conscientious objectors. Nothing could be less Hyde Park Gate, the stuffy upper class neighborhood Virginia and her sister sought to escape by fleeing a few miles to Bloomsbury.
CHAPTER FIVE
Hyde Park Gate is, instead, the nexus of Forsyte land. For years the novels by John Galsworthy were out of fashion, despite an improbable Nobel Prize for Literature for their author. But two excellent television productions produced new paperback versions and a boom in sales. Nothing could improve the opinion of the literati—the English literary critic V. S. Pritchett, with his usual high-handed harshness, describes the author’s imagination as “lukewarm,” and The Forsyte Saga is relentlessly described by English literary critics as “middlebrow,” the English literary equivalent of acid in the face—but a new generation of readers discovered this family saga, and discovered that while it is not Middlemarch it is nonetheless quite entertaining and often moving. It is also a book in which London features almost mathematically as a map of the fortunes, aspirations, limitations, and adaptations of its various characters.
I’m not sure if anyone has ever put together a Forsyte’s tour of London, although having been handed innumerable flyers for several Dickens one-man shows, a Sherlock Holmes impersonation, and a look at the phony London Dungeon that has been staged as a kind of quasihistorical amusement park ride, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. It is the perfect tourist novel, in some sense, since so much of it is about what people own, what it says about them, and how their lives appear from the outside. In other words, real estate and facades.
It is possible to organize a tour yourself, somewhat in the manner of the “Good Walk” section of a Fodor’s guidebook that loops around what were once called “the fashionable ways.” It’s also possible to be struck immediately by how little has changed, and how much, which, of course, is the keynote of London. Galsworthy draws a little map in words, early on in this doorstop of a book, confident, it’s clear, that his readers will understand the code contained in the addresses: “There was old Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the James in Park Lane; Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde Park Mansions—he had never married, not he!—the Soamses in their nest in Knightsbridge, the Rogers in Princes Gardens.”
They are all still there, 150 years after the action of the novel: the tall houses with the white fronts and the dignified columns, the street where Swithin lived, with its buffer of old-growth trees from the busy traffic of the Bayswater Road. But Park Lane was savaged in the early part of the last century, the bowfront houses with gardens running right down to the edge of the greensward largely demolished and the road along Hyde Park widened into a major autobahn. The broad avenue is a hodgepodge now: of lovely